okay actually I decided to try it for fun and the conlangers kinda went off with constructing etymologies and shit. sharing the results of my quick and dirty experimental place-name construction and how I arrived at it so said conlangers can nitpick me.
Starting name: Merwan
Name given by the local Thaish people to a range of low, glaciated old mountains along the southeastern coast of the Isle Varnaan. It’s supposed to mean “anthills” or “ant nests” in an older dialect. I’ve been wanting to update it so it follows the (loose) conventions I’ve established for Thaish phonology and syntax. The Thaish language family is very-somewhat-slightly inspired by Old Irish and Proto-Celtic, with some Proto-Brythonic thrown in just because.
So, starting out - establish the name we want means “ant nest” (I’m going with nest to avoid the repetition of hill/mountain).
Ant: I want the Thaish word to translate literally to “biting thing”.
Nest: I’m making a word that can mean nest, den, lair, etc. Used in reference to animals, usually never to humans unless in a negative sense ( “scurrying back to his nest, is he?” ).
Dedicated conlangers won’t like this but I just played with sounds until I hit on something I liked and which sounded internally consistent.
Wead = ant, lit. “biting thing”, from Proto-Thaish eathi, “to cut”. Shares a root with ead, the word for river.
Imin = nest, from Proto-Thaish eimiini, “to hide”.
Thaish word order is subject (n) + descriptor (adj) so this comes out as imin wead.
Thaish also likes compounding place-names, so we end up with Iminwead.
According to Thaish conventions, a place-name always includes a prefix that tells you what kind of place it is (Dan for a mountain, Ead for a river, Tir for a city, etc). That gives us Dana Iminwead. In the case of mountains, the descriptor can also be used alone by modifying it into a plural noun with the suffix -a. Now we have Iminweada as well.
Old South Varnaanite Thaish: Dana Iminwead, Iminweada
For realism’s sake, I want to simulate what happens with real languages over time. I’ve decided that modern Thaish has trended towards simplified vowel sounds, and heavily favors consonant-heavy forms, the Varnaanite dialects especially. In Modern South Varnaanite Thaish, Iminwead has been condensed to Minwed, dropping the vowel at the beginning of the name.
So we end up with: Dana Minwed, Minweda
Honestly, I feel like this isn’t too bad for my first real attempt at a fully constructed word. It keeps the spirit of the original but (to me at least) also feels more in line with the linguistic conventions I’ve come up with.